How do you stay close from half a world away? Long absences are a part of oceanography, and months away from home are something that all sailors cope with. In centuries past, sailors left home for two, three, or more years at a time, often not knowing when they would come home and communicating only […]

Dr. Adam Kustka has been wearing the same gray-and-black windbreaker for about two weeks. He doesn’t appear to sleep at all except for short naps, which consist of pulling his hood up and putting his head down on his desk in front of his computer monitor. His hands remain over the keyboard so that when […]

It was the color of the ocean from space that brought us here. We knew it was a gamble, a dogleg away from our main sampling plan. But satellites were telling us that phytoplankton were flourishing here, over deep water, where no one could explain it and no one had ever been to study it […]

After three days of overcast skies and whitecaps, today the wind settled and the sky cleared. Sun warmed the observation deck on the bow, and stiff-winged snow petrels flittered among the waves as if impatient for the wind to return. We had steamed south about 120 miles to get some more information from an interesting […]